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DPD.......................................................p8
MT Awards 2021 winner profile Customer Care Award
People skills
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Winning this category has become a habit for DPD, which impressed the judges by rising to the challenge of delivering great customer service during the pandemic as lockdown led to an unprecedented surge in volumes
TIM JONES: “We cannot compromise on the quality of our drivers”
DPD has won the Customer Care Award six times in the past seven years. One judge of the 2021 awards said: “This entry demonstrates breathtaking attention to detail, and a winning combination of dedication and innovation.”
Another judge described it as “a truly exceptional entry from a truly exceptional company” which “answered the brief and addressed all points clearly with good supporting evidence”.
DPD is the UK’s number one domestic B2C parcels carrier, more than doubling turnover since 2015 by establishing itself as the go-to carrier for retailers who value a personalised home-delivery experience. Its 22,000-strong team delivers more than 350 million parcels per year for 7,500 customers, including brands such as ASOS, Currys,
Selfridges, Fortnum & Mason, Gousto, EE and Next.
The pandemic meant 2020 was the most challenging year in DPD’s 50-year history – but another successful one, with turnover up £544m to £1.93bn. One of the strongest indicators of customer loyalty is that nearly 70% of its top 100 customers have been with DPD for five years or more.
Rigorous research
DPD’s goal every year is to give customers compelling reasons to stick with the company, and that starts with regular and rigorous research to find out what is most important to them. Its January 2020 survey of its top 100 customers revealed that 92% were ‘very satisfied’ or ‘satisfied’, 93% were likely to remain a customer, and its Net Promoter Score was 68%.
While this has since risen to a world-class 70% in the latest survey, DPD is never complacent and works hard to understand why 27% of its customers in 2020 were not promoters of its service.
“The whole point of doing these things is not a backslapping exercise,” says Tim Jones, director of marketing, communications and sustainability. “It is to identify what we need to do to get to the standard we want to be at. It is the same as ‘rate your driver’ on our consumer app – while it is overwhelmingly positive, what we want to know is where we got it wrong.
“The last thing anyone who is serious about customer care – which we are – should be saying is ‘we have 70% NPS, that’s brilliant’. It is all about the people you haven’t got it right with because it isn’t just a parcel, it is someone’s present, someone’s promise and even someone’s dream.”
With a million parcels per day going through the hubs, it takes only a slight glitch to affect a customer’s service and Jones knows that pleasing every customer every day is very difficult.
“The NPS is like taking someone’s pulse at a moment in time,” he says. “A customer might mark us down on that day and three months later would give us 100%. While NPS is a very important measure, it is a moment in time – and by the nature of a fast-moving, high-volume business, things will change.
“With our regular contact with customers, issues are quickly identified and resolved. The culture at DPD is never to rest on our laurels and we always want to do better and make the customers even happier.”
The key to delivering great customer service during the pandemic was the way DPD’s network rose to the challenge of coping with a huge surge in volumes while improving service levels, a great tribute to the operational team at HQ in Oldbury as well as the 84 depots.
With high-street retailers forced to close in March, a huge surge in online shopping saw volumes leap by 55% within 10 days of the start of the lockdown. By the end of 2020, the equivalent of three-and-a-half years’ projected growth had hit the company in just nine months. Before the pandemic Jones predicted that the 15% share of retail sales that had gone online was just the beginning.
“For me, online was just getting going and all the pandemic has done is give it a big boost,” he says. “We see the current levels of online activity will be sustained and that is part of our plans.”
DPD adapted to the huge rise in volumes with four key initiatives: Activating the Intelligent Operations Centre (IOC) – its ‘mission control’ for handling a crisis; Developing a new ‘continuous wave’ operation to squeeze more capacity from existing depots; Further enhancing its app, inviting consumers to rate their drivers; Measuring and motivating depot managers to deliver the best-possible customer experience.
The initial surge in volumes caused by lockdown was handled by drivers switching from their usual four-day week to a six-day week, which is a flexible working pattern agreed with them three years ago to handle the pre-Christmas peak.
The IOC was also the main forum to monitor progress on an ambitious goal to recruit and train 4,350 new delivery drivers and 3,000 other operational staff in order to have high-quality people in place in time for the preChristmas peak, when volumes traditionally rise by 40%.
DPD’s three pillars – soon to be joined by a fourth, sustainability – are service, technology and people, and, despite the skills shortages facing the logistics industry, Jones says DPD was not short of applications from good people leaving retail, hospitality and travel; one successful applicant was a former airline pilot, for example.
“We cannot compromise on the quality of our drivers,” he says. “All new drivers go through a start-up programme, and we are a prestige brand offering the best kit. There is also the potential for our self-employed drivers to earn significantly more than the national wage. Those factors help attract and – crucially – retain quality staff.”
NO BRIDGE TOO FAR: DPD delivers more than 1.4 million parcels daily on 12,000 routes
Before the pandemic hit the UK, DPD’s existing operation meant that delivery drivers could only leave the depots knowing that they had all their parcels on board for their route once all inbound trailers had been tipped. In a typical depot this would produce a surge of up to 120 drivers all leaving in a tight time window between 8am and 8.45am. While such volumes are manageable in normal times, the process was not coping well with a sudden 49% increase in home shopping.
So DPD speeded up the development of a new route allocation system known as ‘Quantum’, designed to spread out driver departure times and ensure that 1.4 million parcels are correctly allocated to 12,000 routes.
Delivery drivers leave each site in three continuous waves, with one batch leaving by 7.30am with their full route, a further batch at 8.30am and the final group of drivers at 9.30am, with all their parcels on board. This means that the same postcode can be served in different waves by different drivers, making the operation much more flexible.
Data collection
Executing this new operation meant finding a way for drivers to leave depots before all the inbound trailers had been tipped by changing a process that had been part of DPD’s operation for 25 years.
This was done by employing the Google app engine to collect data about each parcel’s destination at the time of collection from the customer (say, 5pm on the day before delivery) rather than at the end of sortation in the hubs (around 4am on delivery day).
DPD believes this is a first for the parcels sector and that it helped improve its annual service performance to its best-ever result of 99.99% in 2020, a performance DPD describes, with typical understatement, as “decent”.
Although handling the pandemic occupied much of its focus in 2020, DPD continued to improve consumers’ doorstep experience. The biggest innovation was to add a ‘rate your driver’ function to the app, which DPD believes is another important step forwards in terms of setting it apart from the competition.
Drivers have received 1.5m thumbs-ups since launch in October 2020 – and while the 8,700 thumbs-downs represent only 0.58% of feedback, Jones regards this as 8,700 too many and each one is investigated thoroughly.
This real-time data from the doorstep also enables DPD to reward its best drivers, while also holding accountable the tiny minority of drivers who consistently fall below the expected high standards.
Giving consumers and customers a great delivery experience relies heavily on the managers at DPD’s 84 nationwide depots producing a near-flawless operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week. DPD’s approach to motivating its managers is simple: Define what great looks like; Give their teams the tools they need to do the job; Rigorously measure how each site is performing; Call out failures and celebrate success.
Depots that consistently deliver performance above 99.85% receive up to £5,000 per year for their social fund.
This focus on data-driven performance management produced best-ever results in 2020. In the busiest week of 2020 (three weeks before Christmas) it delivered 9.8m parcels, up from 6.5m in 2019. Despite this unprecedented 50% increase, overall annual service performance rose from 99.84% in 2019 to 99.99% in 2020.
While DPD is primarily a next-day carrier, the company recently acquired same-day courier CitySprint and Jones hints that same-day deliveries will be an increasingly important part of DPD’s service offering.
“Our business is next-day, but same-day is definitely on our radar,” he says. “I can’t say too much as the CitySprint deal hasn’t yet been ratified, but as soon as it is we will have plenty more to say about same-day. We think there is a growing demand for same-day deliveries and we will have some very exciting opportunities for DPD’s and CitySprint’s customers.” ■
